Mrs Bathurst and the It Girl

 short story: Mrs Bathurst by Rudyard Kipling

published 1904

 

 

 

“Then the Western Mail came in to Paddin’ton on the big magic lantern sheet. First we saw the platform empty an’ the porters standin’ by. Then the engine come in, head on, an’ the women in the front row jumped: she headed so straight. Then the doors opened and the passengers came out and the porters got the luggage—just like life. Only—only when any one came down too far towards us that was watchin’, they walked right out o’ the picture, so to speak. I was ’ighly interested, I can tell you. So were all of us. I watched an old man with a rug ’oo’d dropped a book an’ was tryin’ to pick it up, when quite slowly, from be’ind two porters—carryin’ a little reticule an’ lookin’ from side to side—comes out Mrs. Bathurst. There was no mistakin’ the walk in a hundred thousand. She come forward—right forward—she looked out straight at us with that blindish look which Pritch alluded to. She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture—like—like a shadow jumpin’ over a candle, an’ as she went I ’eard Dawson in the ticky seats be’ind sing out: ‘Christ! There’s Mrs. B.!’”

 

 

comments: The screenshot is from a remarkable piece of (enhanced and colorized) film that was doing the rounds on Twitter recently – you can find it here. It shows crowds at Waterloo station in the 1930s. HistoryGirl posted it, and then writer Lucy Flannery pointed it out to me, saying that there was a figure at a certain point who needed her own novel. I watched it first, and was greatly struck by one of the women in it. I then checked Lucy’s timing, and it was of course exactly the same person. I replied ‘Where's she going, why is she hurrying so elegantly...?’ It’s the woman in the centre above.

 

The images have been living in my mind ever since, and suddenly I had a lightbulb moment, and I realized it was making me think of a story by Rudyard Kipling. Mrs Bathurst is famously intriguing, discuss-able, and perhaps incomprehensible. Different people get different things out of it.

 

The scene above  has a group of soldiers watching a newsreel in a cinema in South Africa. They are recognizing Mrs Bathurst, a widow from New Zealand who had an inn there and is famously  nice and kind and very attractive – she is quite young. We never find out what she is doing at Paddington. We find out almost nothing about her, certainly very little that is fact (from within the story’s world).

One of the men is obsessed by the newsreel and goes to see it over and over again. This is his companion: “Two shilling seats for us two; five minutes o’ the pictures, an’ perhaps forty-five seconds o’ Mrs. B. walking down towards us with that blindish look in her eyes an’ the reticule in her hand. Then out walk—and drink till train time.”

Finally the man with the obsession takes off upcountry. Has he gone missing to look for her? Later there are reports of dead bodies.

 

But my hapless description (the story just is extremely hard to summarise) does not even begin to reach the strangeness, the randomness of Mrs Bathurst, the story, let alone the woman herself, who appears only via others’ perceptions.

 

The whole tale takes the form of a long discursive conversation among a group of men stuck with nothing to do but chat and drink for an afternoon. Kipling takes the time to explain how they all come together, even though this is not strictly relevant - he's like the pub bore who tells a story: ‘well it happened on a Wednesday, no I tell a lie, it must’ve been a Thursday, I was on my way back from the shops, and I got caught in those roadworks on the A30 although normally I take a different route... do you know Bill? Maybe you know his sister….?’

 

But Kipling gets away with it, he holds you in his spell, and you think, ‘well, he must have had a reason for telling this story in this way’. And the result for me is that I think about this story a lot.

 

It is an extraordinary, mysterious story, and has been much analyzed and discussed by Kipling experts, who tend to disagree (‘Miss Tompkins’ superb study stumbles at this point.’) There are two corpses in the story – people don’t even agree on who one of them is. There’s the teeth in the pocket - if that’s what they are, we have to assume.

 

One critic, Harry Ricketts, has this great, and I think helpful, description: 

It was, in effect, the first modernist text in English. Deliberate obliqueness, formal fragmentation, absence of a privileged authorial point of view, intense literary self-consciousness, lack of closure – all the defining qualities of modernism were present and correct.

Anyway, we’ve all always wondered what the mysterious and  unknowable Mrs B looked like – she was someone who could inspire a great passion in a glimpse. She was the original It Girl.

 

This is what the men say about her:

 

“I can remember every time that I ever saw Mrs. B.”

“So can I—an’ I’ve only been to Auckland twice—how she stood an’ what she was sayin’ an’ what she looked like. That’s the secret. ’Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walked down a street…”

 

It is useful to have read the story: When you have quiet moments or want a new topic to think about, it gives you something to do: you can think about Mrs B and snatch at the story as it drifts past.

 

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Kipling’s reputation has gone through some dips, and for some he is just instantly dismissed as a racist. I suspect this is people acting on reports rather than having read him. He very much has attitudes of his time (yes yes I know it’s the standard getout), and there is an otherness, a form of orientalism. But his picture of the times is unmatched, and he is not as unquestioning as people seem to think – of course he doesn’t lay into what we now know to be the bad effects of empire and colonialism, but he does try to take a good look at what’s going on. His humanity, his imagination and his nuance are amazing, and the thing he really really does is ask questions, and listen, and change his mind.

 

George Orwell writes very well about him, looking at exactly this idea of his changing reputation.

As a young person who haunted the public library, I borrowed Kipling’s Kim many times, and absolutely loved it. (there is a tiny micro-genre of books about child spies – nearly always boys – Kim, The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and a WW2 thriller called The Paladin by Brian Garfield, and I love them all. Does anyone have any others?)

Early in Kim, Kipling says this:

India is the only democratic land in the world.

An earlier borrower had commented in pencil beside this ‘What about the untouchable caste system?’ I was tremendously taken with this idea of debate, while being far too scared to add anything myself. There were further comments throughout the book, but that is the one I remember.

 

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Of course the lady in the newsreel is years later and at a different railway station – Waterloo rather than Paddington – she is a positive addition to my thoughts about Mrs Bathurst, but not the final word.  So I looked for a picture from around 1902, when the story is set, and found another potential Mrs Bathurst  - she is Marta Sandal, a Norwegian singer, and she looks as though she could stop you in your tracks. She was much admired by the composer Grieg. From the Bergen public library.